San Antonio now has its own Google page. A department of the California-based information giant, Google Arts and Culture is creating a growing group of web pages dedicated to the arts and culture features of locales around the globe.
On Friday, San Antonio became the seventh city in the nation to get its own page, joining Kansas City, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Cleveland and Milwaukee in receiving the distinction.
Before announcing the launch of the new arts and culture-focused page to local luminaries gathered at the San Antonio Botanical Garden, Surya Tubach, U.S. lead for Google Arts and Culture, extolled the virtues of the city.
“It’s such a confluence of cultures,” Tubach said. “It’s got amazing heritage and history. … There’s so much to talk about here, so it just seemed like a perfect fit.”
Visitors to the site can explore various facets of San Antonio’s cultural institutions and initiatives through 1,600 images and themed collections of visual stories.
In demonstrating the site during the Friday morning announcement, Tubach marveled at the 600 public sculptures stationed throughout the city, pointing out the street view capabilities of Google Maps and the “virtual stroll” capacity of 360-degree imaging as ways to engage with information on the site.
Tubach and her New York-based team began the project two years ago by contacting the Villa Finale Museum and Gardens, thanks to its membership in the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The staff recommended other institutions to contact, and the office of U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro provided recommendations and opened doors to city leaders, Tubach said.
At the announcement, Mayor Ron Nirenberg thanked the Google Arts and Culture team for “making San Antonio’s beauty available worldwide.” Pointing toward the various cultural partners involved in the project, including the city’s Department of Arts and Culture, Nirenberg said San Antonio’s “secret sauce is collaboration and teamwork.”
Institutions featured include the San Antonio Botanical Garden, the Alamo, Briscoe Western Art Museum, San Antonio Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, Ruby City, the Contemporary at Blue Star, Port San Antonio, Witte Museum, San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, the Holocaust Memorial of San Antonio and Casa Navarro among 19 current partners.
Each contributed stories of the city’s past and present, from lunch counter desegregation at the downtown Walgreens in 1960 to achieving UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy status in 2017.
Tubach described the newly launched page as “phase one,” saying that her team hopes to keep growing the project with more San Antonio partners.
Any cultural nonprofit can join the platform, she said, “so long as they have a collection to share and stories to tell.” A Google form is available on the site for institutions to inquire about joining.
New McNay Art Museum director Matthew McLendon praised the Google Arts and Culture project for creating new paths of accessibility to the world’s cultural institutions.
He described the project as “another piece in the mosaic of how we need to think about accessibility of our cultural institutions,” and said it extends the wave of innovative online programming spurred by pandemic shutdowns.
Having the museum’s architecture and collections explorable online “open[s] up our programs to segments of the population that have obstacles to actually physically coming into the institution for any number of reasons, and we’ve learned very quickly how important this type of access really is.”
